


The fucking kitten

by pleasebekidding



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Kitten, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 10:49:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pleasebekidding/pseuds/pleasebekidding
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I swore you could send me something fluffy and I would make you cry.<br/>Some idiot sent me a kitten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The fucking kitten

It’s been three days since he buried Alaric.

Damon sits on the couch, mostly, and wonders if Alaric is even there. If he’s watching. He wants to flip the switch on his humanity more than anything else in the world but hell if he’ll do it without knowing if Alaric can see him. The other thing he wants to do is talk to him, in case he can hear, but he won’t do that. Talk in the dark like a fucking crazy person.

The cat leaps up onto the back of the couch and nuzzles into his face.

Damon doesn’t react.

The cat, the damn cat – well, it’s a kitten, he supposes. It lowers itself into Alaric’s spot on the couch and looks at him, and meows.

Damon doesn’t react.

It presses its tiny paws to his thigh.

Damon doesn’t react.

—

The fucking cat. Stupid thing. It’s supposed to hate vampires. Cats do. They hate vampires. In a hundred and forty… whatever years, Damon has never gotten close enough to a cat to touch it. But this one is stupid, and it’s not even Damon’s cat. It’s just a fluffy black stray that Alaric brought home like a prize one day.

“What’s that for?”

It earned him a withering look.

“It’s a cat, Damon. They’re not for anything. They’re just cats, and they’re cute, and if you’re nice to them, they like you. I found it. Um. Him. I think.”

“Then put it back.”

“I didn’t steal it from someone’s yard, idiot,” Alaric said, and closed his free hand over Damon’s neck, pulling him in for a kiss. Alaric was the only person who’d ever loved him so recklessly, so completely, so unself-consciously. Who hadn’t tried to change him.

Not that he was unchanged. Turned out it was true. If someone loved you right it made you want to do better, be better. And he’d been better. When Alaric fed the scrawny little mongrel smoked salmon from the fridge he glared, but he let the thing stay, and it had stayed.

“It’s not coming in the bedroom,” he’d muttered, and Alaric had nodded.

“Of course,” he’d agreed. But by the end of the week the cat was climbing up onto the bed in the night, settling behind Alaric’s knees, or under Damon’s chin.

But it wasn’t Damon’s cat.

It isn’t Damon’s cat. And he doesn’t like it. And he doesn’t know how it keeps getting inside.

—

It paws at his thigh some more and eventually, Damon reacts, lifting it by the scruff and depositing it on the floor. It responds by leaping into his lap and purring. He puts it down again and heads out of the library on unsteady feet. He goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge to grab a blood bag and the damn thing is on his feet, gazing adoringly at him.

“Go away,” he says, so it follows him back to the library.

That night, it meows miserably outside the closed bedroom door until Damon actually throws a pillow – a pillow – at his door, but that doesn’t shut it up so he pads across the floorboards and opens the door.

He points his index finger at the little bastard.

“I’m taking you to the shelter,” he says. “And you’re sleeping on the end of the bed. Don’t touch me.”

But when the cat curls into the crook of his neck and shoulder, Damon tells himself he’s too sleepy to do anything but brush his fingers against the fur.

—

Elena knocks on the door and she looks frankly shocked to see the tiny fluffy spawn of Satan perched on Damon’s shoulder.

“Damon. You have…”

“It won’t leave,” Damon says with a sneer. “What are you doing here?”

Elena pushes through the door, and crosses her arms. She looks sort of impressive, actually. Twenty-two suits her. “I came to see exactly how drunk you are. You look alright.”

He glares. “I don’t need this right now. Come back next month.”

“Damon…”

“Elena.” The cat drops into arms he knows will be ready to catch him, a hand that will scratch behind his ears. “I can’t.” He glares his best glare and sneers his best sneer. “I’m _busy_.”

He is fully aware that he doesn’t look busy.

“Are you okay?”

No, because after this many years chasing Katherine and then Elena and all the rest of his utter bullshit Damon found love, and then he got fucking robbed. “Yep. You should go.”

Elena reaches to scratch the cat, but it rears back, only wants Damon’s hands.

Like Alaric only wanted Damon’s hands.

“You should go,” Damon says. What he doesn’t add is ‘because I am going to fucking cry and I hate everything and if it wasn’t for this fucking cat I’d take my ring off and march into the sun.’ He doesn’t say it but he thinks it.

Elena goes.

—

The cat gets to be twenty-six years old, and it never has a name, but Damon treats it like the last part of Alaric left standing. And the day he buries it, he eyes his ring; and hopes that something else comes along that will make it worth surviving just a little while longer.


End file.
